I had the opportunity to visit Nelson County schools with several other education technology leaders a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been meaning to get this posted. There were about 8 districts represented, and the room was packed. All gained valuable experiences, used new resources, and looked at instruction, teaching, and learning in a slightly new or expanded way. However, most importantly, the design was also to focus on the Nelson County teachers and leaders and to go through a process of seeing where they are now and realizing how important it is to understand where their students need to go (specifically what opportunities and experiences they should have throughout their learning lives while in NC schools).
I have to say that this was a really well developed learning day for leaders. Author, teacher, and thought leader, Adam Garry with Dell Inc., lead the conversations with elegance, passion (including compassion), and disruption. If you ever get the opportunity to participate in one of these sessions with Adam, take advantage of it. It’s worth your thought time. It was great to see folks go in the tunnel, not knowing what to expect, and then come out on the other side with a glimmer of an idea. For me, it was also great to see folks asking many questions at the end concerning “now what?” That means there was an impact. The awareness activities worked. From the beginning of the session, I started capturing notes in an analog Wordl method (resource/ idea visual). As you can see from below image, the main takeaways were: students as consumers/producers/creators; students owning their own proof of learning; college & career ready is assessing our success; you can’t critically think about nothing; 3 types of problem solving; participatory and experiential learning; failure is OK;
(Click to see full size)
(Click to see full size)
Below is a short (linked) list of websites used in demonstration and activity with participants.
- Google Squared | WonderWheel | Timelines | News Timeline
- Page Flakes
- TED Talks – OK Go, Rube Goldberg Machines (challenge based learning)
- Autotune The News (authentic purposes for writing and producing)
- Trailer Mashups (authentic purposes for writing and producing)
- Tipstrategies.com (interactive map)
- Glogster
- Dipity (interactive timelines)
- Tagzedo (the best tag cloud generator around – visual representations)
- StoryBird (collaborative storytelling)
- Teaching the iGeneration by Adam Gary (Amazon Link)
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on my presentation. I am glad that you enjoyed the session.